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KING'S CHAPEL 



THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON, 



HENRY WILDER FOOTE, 



(! 



KING'S CHAPEL 



THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 



A DISCOURSE 



BY » 



HENRY WILDER FOOTE, 



GIVEN IN KING'S CHAPEL, SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 1876. 



n. 



PRINTED BY REQUEST. 



BOSTON: 

GEORGE H. ELLIS, No. 7 TREMONT PLACE. 

1876. 

Av-0 






Press of Geo. H. Ellis. 



DISCOURSE. 



Psalms xHv., i: "We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us^ 
what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old." 

Such passages of Scripture as this — and there are 
many of them — form one of the most inspiring charac- 
teristics of the Bible. They do so in this regard, that 
they make it speak not of God alone, nor of man alone, 
but that they bring God and man together. They 
affirm the great fact of Divine Providence in the grand- 
est way, making it not only to be over individuals, but 
over humanity ; they affirm the great fact of human 
dependence in the grandest way, making it to be from 
one generation to another, lifting us up out of our sepa- 
rate and lonely lives into a share in the life of the race, 
and giving us the only reason for thinking it worth 
while to have this share, because we see that the life of 
the race is lived under the eye of God. Such an appeal 
to the historic faithfulness of God accords with the 
thoughts which I would bring to your mind at this 
time. 

The peculiar associations of this old church with the 
Revolutionary chapter of our city's history seemed to 



4 KING S CHAPEL AND THE 

make it desirable to mark here to-day a significant land- 
mark in connection with the evacuation of Boston one 
hundred years ago. The last service held here during 
the siege of the city is a picturesque moment in the 
history of a "lost cause," and it also marks a transitional 
point in the religious position of this church. The real 
congregation of to-day and the shadowy congregation 
of one hundred years ago stand face to face for this 
hour. 

In what I have to say, I must needs touch in part on 
facts already known to those who have heard the dis- 
courses given here some winters ago, on the history 
of this church. It is a portion of that history which 
for many years after the Revolution was obscured by 
the intensity of the popular feeling. The very name of 
"Kings" Chapel was changed on the popular tongue to 
that of the " Stone " Chapel, until a wise thought dis- 
cerned that it could be called the Church of the " King 
of kings." There was a time when it would have been 
thought unpatriotic for us not to be ashamed of the fact 
that King George's officials and the Tory gentry went 
here to church. But that day is long past, I trust, when 
we should not be able to speak with respect of many of 
them. Loyalty to their king and fidelity to their ordi- 
nation or other official oath compelled them — many of 
them with an absolutely pure and single mind — to leave 
their country for conscience' sake ; and having left it 
they had to suffer pains of loneliness and an aching 
heart, to be strangers in the proud old land which they 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 5 

had been accustomed to call "mother country" and 
" home," to endure supercilious patronage or cool indif- 
ference from those ruling powers for "which they had 
sacrificed everything, to eat the bread of poverty and 
grudging charity from the British treasury, to know that 
they were declared aliens by the land of their birth, their 
property confiscated, and they made ruined men, and to 
say with Hamlet : — 

" O, what a wounded name, 
Things standing thus unknown, I leave behind me." 

Besides, the fact is, that the majority of pew-holders 
here were on the patriot side, and the first minister after 
the war had been a prisoner of war in a British receiving- 
ship. And if the church had still needed to prove its 
American heart, let yonder monument testify of that, 
with its roll of martyrs in our own war— longer than 
that of any other church with which I am acquainted. 
-Jiiis year, however, is called the year of reconciliation, 
and if it is to mark the extinction of the embers which 
have burned so furiously in our own time, surely it may 
see the flowers of forgiveness bloom over those which 
have been extinguished for a century. 

We stand here among the monuments of a generation 
utterly gone and of ways of life of which this is well-nigh 
the only memorial. So far as I am aware, King's Chapel 
and Christ Church are now the only historical buildings 
remaining unchanged from before the Revolution of all 
those in which Boston was once so rich. This church 
has been received by the present generation as a pre- 



6 KING S CHAPEL AND THE 

cious trust to be guarded carefully for those who are to 
come after us, and, let us hope, to be prized aright by 
the whole community which possesses it ! When we 
joined in our forms of worship this morning, I read the 
prayers in part from the old liturgy which was on this 
reading-desk one hundred years ago, stamped with the 
blazon G. R., for King George, and now containing the 
alterations of the service in the handwriting of James 
Freeman. The interior, as well as the outside of the 
building, is almost identically the same as when the 
Revolution began. Only the stately Governor's pew is 
gone. All other things remain. 

Chief among these is the noble organ still standing 
opposite, procured from England by subscription of 
members of the church in 1756. It cost in London 
;!^5oo sterling, and with all charges here, £62,7. The 
bill of lading, still preserved among our papers, is inter- 
esting from its pious formula : — 

" Shipped by the Grace of God in good order and well 
conditioned, by Thomlinson, Trecothick & Co., in and 
upon the good ship called the Pultiuy, whereof is Master 
under God for this present voyage Thomas Farr and 
now riding at anchor in the River Thames and by God's 
Grace bound for Boston New England ; to say forty-four 
cases and parcells containing an organ, etc., etc., etc. 

" And so God send the good ship to her desired port 
in safety. Amen." A prayer which many lovers of 
the church must have breathed. The Boston Gazette 
and Country yoiirnal of August 30, 1756, announced 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 7 

to its readers: "We hear that the organ which lately 
arrived from London by Capt. Farr for King's Chapel 
in this town, will be opened on Thursday next in the 
afternoon, and that said organ (which contains a variety 
of curious stops never yet heard in these parts) is 
esteemed by the most eminent masters in England, to 
be equal, if not superior, to any of the same size in 
Europe. There will be a sermon suitable to the occa- 
sion. Prayers to begin at four o'clock." " There is a 
very current tradition respecting this organ," says Dr. 
Greenwood, "that it was selected by Handel himself. 
Takino- into consideration the above reference to 'the 
most eminent masters in England,' we receive this tradi- 
tion as founded in truth. And, moreover, as the organ 
was designed for the King's Chapel in New England, we 
may readily suppose that His Majesty's favorite musician 
would at least be desired to give his opinion of its merits, 
and that this opinion, being favorable, might be called a 
'selection,' even if the 'mighty master' gave himself no 
further trouble with its purpose. Handel died m 1758, 
and was blind eight years before his death. But sight 
was not at all necessary in the office supposed to be 
consigned to him, and though his eyes never could have 
measured the external proportions of this organ, his ears 
most probably have judged of its tones and powers, and 
his own hands rested on its keys." The organ still 
retains enough of its personality to be the same which 
has helped the devotions of this house for one hundred 
and sixteen years. It has been repaired again and agam. 



8 king's chapel and the 

In i860 it was greatly enlarged, and at that time the old 
key-board on which Handel's hands may have rested was 
taken away. According to the custom of the period, the 
keys which now are white were then made of ebony, and 
the keys which now are black were made of ivory. The 
outside case, and many of the pipes, and some of the 
sweetest stops in the instrument remain unchanged. 

I shall not attempt to tell the story of the great 
events of which Boston was the scene and centre in 
those momentous years, from the times when it heard 
its last king proclaimed by trumpet from the Old State 
House balcony, and rejoiced over in King's Chapel, to 
the day when these walls echoed to the retreating 
drums of the British troops, and saw the Continental 
army enter the town in triumph. Three out of the 
four Royal Governors of this stormy time attended 
worship in this church, and sat in yonder Governor's 
pew, — Sir Francis Bernard, Gen. Gage, and Sir William 
Howe. Gov. Hutchinson was a member of the Brick 
Church at the North End, but he was friendly to the 
church, and it is entered in our records, Dec. i, 1772, 
that he received the thanks of the church " for pro- 
curing the King's Donation for a service of plate and 
pulpit Furniture for the King's Chapel." Here came 
Gov. Bernard to hear Dr. Caner's sermon on " The 
Great Blessing of Stable Times," on the conclusion of 
the treaty of peace between Great Britain and France 
in 1763, — the peace which freed our fathers from the 
fear which had been over them from their first settle- 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 9 

ment of the country. Here came Gov. Bernard in 
other darker and more ominous times, and his suc- 
cessors in days blacker yet. As I pore over our old 
records, the votes of the proprietors and of the vestry, 
and the long and crowded pages which record the 
never-ending procession of the dead — pages for the 
most part utterly silent concerning the events which 
were rocking Church and State with earthquake throes, 
— their very silence sometimes speaks more loudly than 
any words. Now I come to some name famous here 
then, but never spoken for nearly one hundred years, 
except as a part of that momentous history; and now 
again it is the date of a year and month, perhaps even 
of the day, which marks one of the eras in that great 
time. When the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, and 
the mob wrought its wild ruin in Lieutenant-Governor 
Hutchinson's house, they first swept through the house 
of one of the prominent members of this congrega- 
tion; and the name of another is forever associated 
with one of those half-grotesque, half-terrible displays 
of popular wrath at the famous " Liberty Tree," the 
great elm at the corner of what is now Washington and 
Essex Streets, where unacceptable persons were wont 
to be hung in efhgy. Those were the last years of the 
old-fashioned stately courtliness which had been so 
associated with the chapel where the viceroy and his 
little court worshipped. These old walls saw the 
various costumes of that picturesque period gathered 
here. Chariots with liveried black footmen brought 



lO KINGS CHAPEL AND THE 

titled gentlemen and ladies hither, and the square pews 
were gay with modes of dress which live for us in 
Copley's pictures, — the ruffled sleeve and powdered 
wigs and swords, the judges' robes, the satins and 
velvets. And now, ever since the passing of the Tea 
Act in 1767, many a scarlet uniform was seen here too; 
for the Common had been for nine years whitened with 
the tents of British troops, sent over to enforce that 
law. We are left only to imagination for our picture of 
the varied moods of the congregation which gathered 
here while that passionate, popular " sea wrought and 
was tempestuous " ; for while some were royal officials, 
and not a few were loyal subjects of Great Britain, the 
major part of the congregation was native born, and 
must have been largely in sympathy with the wild 
beating of the popular pulse. I doubt not that hearts 
as true as ever loved their country here ached, when the 
March night in 1770 heard the fatal shots ring out in 
King Street which echoed through the continent ; and 
if they counselled moderation, when the South Church 
yonder was thronged with the people whom Faneuil 
Hall could not contain after that " Massacre," and when 
again in 1773 that church saw the great assembly from 
which the band of men went forth to throw the tea into 
Boston harbor, — if they dared not counsel resistance it 
was not because they did not love their country, but 
because it seemed such madness for this little town to 
challenge the resistless power of the British Empire. 
Their judgment was deceived, and they paid the bitter 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. II 

price of exile and ruin. Surely we can do them the 
bare justice now of remembering their loyalty and 
constancy to their own conscience, and in not a few a 
love of the land which cast them out, which was stronger 
than exile, and unembittered by poverty and wrong. 

Stormily closed the ministry of my predecessor in 
this place, the last Church of England rector of the 
Kino-'s Chapel, Dr. Henry Caner. His political senti- 
ments were ardent loyalty, as he would have termed 
them -obstinate Toryism, as the people of Boston soon 
came to consider them. But if there were any question 
what his sentiments were, they are indicated in these 
sentences which I quote from a short prayer before a 
printed sermon of his on Thanksgiving for the General 
Peace, August n, i763.-on "The Great Blessing of 
Stable Times." etc : " Continue thy favor to our sov- 
ereign lord King George Let no unhappy divisions 

disquiet his reign, or interrupt the internal harmony of 
his government." 

Infirm with bodily infirmities, and in his seventy- 
seventh year, his age and his position placed Dr. Caner 
at the head of the Church of England clergy in this part 
of the country. This church, too, had been attended by 
the officers of the British army and navy stationed in 
Boston, which had brought the old minister into yet 
closer bonds of sympathy and fellowship with these 
representatives of the king whose church he served. 
Their red coats were to his eyes the honored uniform 
of a proud service, while to the popular imagination the 



12 KINGS CHAPEL AND THE 

scarlet seemed to be branded by Scripture itself as the 
livery of sin. Our records show abundantly the pastoral 
labor which devolved upon Dr. Caner in his relations 
with his military congregation. The last burials record- 
ed by his trembling hand are those of three soldiers of 
His Majesty's 65th Regiment of Foot. It may well be, 
then, that the first rumor of the evacuation of Boston 
smote on his ear like the breeze that stirs the air before 
a thunder-storm bursts. He seemed to hear the hoarse 
voice of the dreaded mob already surging round his 
house, and crying as Amaziah said to the prophet Amos : 
" O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, 
and there eat bread, and prophesy there : But prophesy 
not any more at Bethel : for it is the king's chapel, and 
it is the king's court." Dr. Caner's escape from Boston 
is thus described by himself, in a letter dated Halifax, 
May 10, 1776 : — 

" As to the clergy of Boston, indeed, they have for 
^eleven months past been exposed to difficulty and 
distress in every shape'; and as to myself, having deter- 
mined to maintain my post as long as possible, I contin- 
ued to officiate to the small remains of my parishioners, 
though without a support, till the loth of March, when I 
suddenly and unexpectedly received notice that the 
king's troops would immediately evacuate the town. It 
is not easy to paint the distress and confusion of the 
inhabitants on this occasion. I had but six or seven 
hours allowed to prepare for this measure, being obliged 
to embark the same day for Halifax, where we arrived 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 1 3 

the 1st of April. This sudden movement prevented me 
from saving my books, furniture, or any part of my 
interest, except bedding, wearing apparel, and a little 
provision for my small family during the passage. 

" I am now at Halifax with my daughter and servant, 
but without any means of support, except what I receive 
from the benevolence of the worthy Dr. Breynton." 

I turn now to his hearers on his last Sunday. Gen- 
eral Gage, who came in May, 1774, as Captain-General 
and Governor of Massachusetts, had been a good church- 
goer, and doubtless his successor was so. Gage heard 
here one sermon, whose text, at least, well pondered, 
would have saved seven years of war and hundreds of 
thousands of lives. For in September, 1774, Rev. Mr. 
Fayervveather, of Narragansett, records in his diary that 
he preached in King's Chapel, Boston, before General 
Gage and his officers, and a very numerous and polite 
assembly, from the text, " Be kindly affectioned one 
tovv^ard another in brotherly love." The commentary 
was written at Lexington and Bunker Hill. 

And now let us look into this church as it may have 
appeared on the last Sunday before the evacuation of 
Boston by the British troops, and try to call up to our 
mental vision the faces of those adherents of the losing 
cause who were gathered here to pray for King George, 
and that he might have victory over all his enemies. 
Out of the one hundred and thirteen pews in the church 
forty were owned by the church itself. Of the fam- 
ilies owning or occupying the remaining seventy-three 



14 KING S CHAPEL AND THE 

pews, about thirty were so absolutely on the loyal or 
Tory side that they had to fly in the great evacuation, 
the other forty-three being probably on the patriot side. 
Let us stand in this pulpit with Dr. Caner, and look with 
his dim eyes in the faces- of this portion of his flock who 
on the next Sunday will be lying with him on shipboard 
in some of the long line of British vessels that will be 
lying in Nantasket Roads, so heavily freighted with 
humiliated pride and disappointed hopes. Thanks to 
Mr. Sabine's admirable History of the American Loyal- 
ists, we can trace the fortunes of these defeated men. 
There, then, they sit in these very pews, men whose 
names, many of them, were hissing on patriotic Amer- 
ican lips, yet to whom now we can often do better 
justice than the hard measure which our fathers meted 
out to them. If time would allow, I could tell you the 
history of almost all of them. But it will be sufficient 
for me to call back the memory of three or four repre- 
sentative men among them. 

An example of the extreme Tories is Charles Paxton, 
in pew No. 4, with his family of five. Mr. Paxton's 
thoughts may well be busy, after the roaring cannon- 
ade from the rebel works, which has suffered neither 
him nor any other dweller in Boston to sleep during 
that dreadful night of Saturday, March 9. He may well 
be thinking how much of all this is his own work. He 
is a gentleman " remarkable for finished politeness and 
courtesy of manners," but the Whigs have cared nothing 
for that. He has had the honor of being hung in effigy 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 1 5 

on the Liberty Tree on Gunpowder-plot day, " between 
the figures of the Devil and the Pope," with the label, 
" Every man's humble servant, but no man's friend." 
He has been " active beyond his associates as one of the 
Commissioners of Customs." John Adams says of him, 
that he appeared at one time " to have been Governor, 
Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary, and Chief-Justice." 
He has the misfortune to be a courtier of Charles 
Townshend. Does he think to-day of the quarrel with 
James Otis in 1769; of the flighjt of the customs' officers 
to Castle William to escape the mob after seizing one of 
John Hancock's vessels for smuggling wine ; of the 
coming of the first troops to Boston, largely at his insti- 
gation ; of the King Street massacre near his Custom 
House ; of the popular rage when Dr. Franklin sent 
home copies of the letters which he and others had writ- 
ten privately to England .-' Never more will he collect 
customs here or elsewhere. He will die in England, 
aged eighty-four, in 1788, his name under ban and his 
property confiscated here. But there are not a few far 
more gracious names than his. 

In pews Nos. 7, 8, sit the family of Dr. Sylvester 
Gardiner. Dr. Gardiner has been Senior Warden of 
King's Chapel at intervals for twenty years. An educated 
physician, a man of great wealth, the proprietor of vast 
estates to the eastward, which he has done great things 
to improve, respected by all, and now in his seventieth 
year, he has no will to leave his home. But the young 
wife, sitting beside him, has so compromised him with 



i6 king's chapel and the 

the Royal party, by her ardent zeal on that side, that he 
must go. Crowded on the vessel which will bear his 
family to Halifax, poorly fed, proscribed, and banished 
in 1778, he yet loves his native country so much that he 
will voluntarily leave behind him his valuable stock of 
medicines and drugs for Washington's army to use, — an 
act which will be rewarded by Massachusetts after the 
war, by the gift of tickets in the State Land Lottery, 
from which Dr. Gardiner's heirs will derive the benefit 
of six thousand acres of land in Washington County, 
Me. The memory of this prominent man is perpetu- 
ated by the name of the town of Gardiner, Me. 

In No. 10 sits Isaac Royall, long a member of the 
Council of the Province, but who had not been sworn 
into office as a Mandamus Councillor. His noble farm 
in Medford lies within the rebel lines to-day. He will 
flee with the rest, and his name will appear among the 
proscribed and banished in 1778. He must taste the 
bitterness of neglect from Lord North and Lord Ger- 
main, and must die in England in October, 1781, and 
never lay his dust beside that of his wife and his 
parents in his beloved Medford. But he is large 
enough to forgive his country for casting him out, and 
to bequeath two thousand acres of land in Worcester 
County to found the first Law Professorship in Harvard 
University. A genial, generous, hospitable man. 

No. yd is occupied by John Vassall, one of that dis- 
tinguished family who have now left here only their 
graves in the Cambridge burial-ground, marked by the 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 1/ 

Vas and Sol, their coat of arms, and the fine old 
monument, erected in this church by John's kinsman, 
Florentius Vassall, of Jamaica, in 1766. Mr. John Vas- 
sall has been living in Boston since early in 1775, having 
been driven by mob from his beautiful home in Cam- 
bridge. That stately house is occupied as the head- 
quarters of George Washington, Esq., commander of 
the rebel muster, and Mr, Vassall's uninvited tenant. 
And it is to have a new glory, a century later, in being 
the home of one of New England's most beloved and 
sweetest poets. 

To pews Nos. 31-32 belongs a special history. Here 
was the State pew, raised on a dais, curtained with crim- 
son ; here had been seen Shirley and Bernard and Gen- 
eral Gage ; and here now the dark and warlike face of 
Sir Wm. Howe looked sternly forth. 

And yet one more remains to speak of, occupying 
No. 91, a woman beautiful still, though now in middle 
age, and wearing widow's weeds. The romantic story 
of Lady Frankland has been told in exquisite verse by 
one of our own poets. It is a story of sin and peni- 
tence, of wonderful escape and strangely varied fortune, 
such as no poet's imagination could ideally surpass. 

And so they went forth from these doors, those repre- 
sentatives of a lost cause, leaving the church, as Dr. 
Caner supposed, to silence. In his note, in the Register 
of Marriages, he wrote : — 

"March 10 [1776]. An unnatural Rebellion of the 
Colonies against his Majesties Government obliged the 
3 



18 KINGS CHAPEL AND THE 

Loyal Part of his subjects to evacuate their dwellings 
and substance, and to take refuge in Halifax, London, 
and elsewhere ; By which means the public Worship 
at King's Chapel became suspended, and is likely to 
remain so, till it shall please God in the Course of 
his Providence to change the hearts of the Rebels, or 
give success to his Majesties arms for suppressing the 
Rebellion." 

Within a month of that date King's Chapel was opened 
again for an impressive solemnity, as if to pledge it for- 
ever to the American cause. 

For here were held the solemn obsequies of Dr- 
Warren, when his remains were disinterred from the 
soldier's grave which he found on Bunker Hill, so soon 
as order was restored to the liberated town. To this 
church they were borne with every mark of honor, and 
here were gathered the noblest and best representa- 
tives of the patriot cause, while an eulogy was spoken 
over them from this pulpit. And then the hospital- 
ity of the church was freely given for more than five 
years to the Old South Church, by the majority of 
our proprietors remaining here, — an act of poetic 
reparation for the wrong done almost a hundred 
years before that to the Old South by Sir Edmund 
Andros. That church and congregation worshipped 
here, their own house of prayer having been marred by 
its use as a riding-school for the British soldiers, and 
the part of the King's Chapel congregation that remained 
worshipped with them, and in this pulpit was ordained 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 1 9 

at that time one of the ministers of the Old South, the 
Rev. Joseph Eckley. I may add here that, in commem- 
oration of these interesting historical affiliations of the 
two churches, your wardens and minister invited the 
ministers of the Old South Church to represent it here 
to-day, and to take part in this service, — a part which 
they were both very reluctantly compelled to decline by 
imperative preaching engagements. 

I have dwelt purposely on this portion of the history 
associated with the memorable events which fell in the 
week just opening one hundred years ago, in the little 
town of Boston, because it is a chapter of the history 
not usually dwelt upon. Our sympathies as true Ameri- 
cans are with those who entered the town with Wash- 
ington, not with those who left it with Howe. There 
are probably very few of us here to-day who are not 
descended from men who then took their lives in their 
hands as rebels, either in places of conspicuous service, 
or at least with the shouldered musket. There can be 
no one here to-day who does not rejoice that those farm- 
ers and sailors of this distant colony had a truer vision 
than the rulers of the empire, and than those who shared 
their blindness on this side of the water. But the good 
of looking back after one hundred years is, that we can 
do justice to both sides. And while we shall have fre- 
quent occasion in these coming days to commemorate 
what our fathers won, we will at least to-day also remem- 
ber all that was upright and self-sacrificing and true to 
conscience in tliose men who went out from this church 



20 KING S CHAPEL AND THE 

with sorrowing hearts, but unreturning feet. They paid 
for what was mistaken in their action and spirit with 
poverty and exile. But their example of fidelity and 
patience we cannot afford to lose. 

And yet to-day our thoughts turn with a pride untem- 
pered by any pity to those our fathers, those who were 
still the majority of this congregation, those to whom 
we owe the memories that thrill our blood in our 
national history, those to whom we owe it, under God, 
that we have a country. They did a work so large and 
generous, in calling this nation into life, that all the 
other nations of the earth could not but share its bless- 
ing. Even the proud people from whom we sprang, 
and from whom that War of Independence tore us free, 
have long seen that our fathers were really fighting their 
best battle not less than ours. On the hundredth anni- 
versary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the London Times 
said : — 

" Not only the Americans, however, but England and 
the world, have far more substantial reasons for a grate- 
ful remembrance of the day. The gain to all sides is 
great and unquestionable. The greater part of the 
American contention in that war was equally shared by 
the British people. The principles of popular repre- 
sentation, and no taxation without it, self-government 
by popular municipal institutions, the independence of 
the judicial bench, and complete responsibility in the 
exercise of all power and patronage, were equally at stake 
on both sides of the Atlantic. No doubt the sense of 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 21 

this added to the reckless and inhuman obstinacy with 
which the British Government persisted in the struggle, 
long after every man at liberty to use his senses and 
reason on the question saw that it was hopeless. 

" Fortunate was it for England that the question was 
fought so far from its shores. The triumph of Ameri- 
can Independence inaugurated a great but bloodless 
work at home in the shape of popular reforms, or, rather, 
in the fuller development of those democratic institu- 
tions by which it has been said the British throne is 
surrounded. Whatever the Americans have gained, we 
have gained also, and now possess substantially all that 
they fought for." 

Why was it, let me ask you, that those plain men, 
bred in a provincial college, or at the plough or the print- 
ing press, were able to lay the foundations of an empire, 
and to see the duty of the hour as the rich and wise 
could not see it ? It seems to me that it was something 
deeper than a passion for liberty, something nobler than 
a sense of their wrongs, nothing less than the burning 
conviction which they had inherited from ^/^ezr fathers, 
that America was a providential people, a nation in trust 
with the great ideas of Christianity. 

It is well, then, that we should hail as significant the 
grand anthem by Handel which has been sung in our 
service to-day, — the same anthem which half a century 
ago was sung at the commemoration in Faneuil Hall of 
the two Presidents of the United States who passed from 
earth on the fiftieth anniversary of their signing the 



22 KING S CHAPEL AND THE 

Declaration of Independence. We catch and echo the 
lofty words : " Their bodies are buried in peace, but 
their soul liveth forevermore." 

That which was at the heart of all they did was 
faith in the invisible power and greatness of Him 
who is the only " stability " of a people's greatness 
and power, — a profound sense of being a providential 
people, called to do a special work in the ages, with 
the solemn consecration upon it of a mighty destiny. 
Such a faith lies, indeed, at the heart of every Chris- 
tian State, and if it were not more or less clearly held 
by the best men everywhere, nations and commonwealths 
would crumble to pieces like ropes of sand. But only 
once before in all history, among the Hebrew race, has 
any people had so clear conviction and testimony of 
being called and chosen to a high and peculiar work for 
the Lord as our fathers had. It was, as has well been 
said, the old faith in prayer, the old faith in God, the 
spirit which led the Pilgrims across the sea, the spirit 
which nerved the hearts of the men of God who fought 
at Naseby and Marston Moor, the spirit of Israel of 
old against the Philistines, of David with his stone 
and sling against the giant of Gath with his armor of 
proof. 

Now, is it only the fond dream of an American heart 
that these principles of a Christian Commonwealth belong 
to us still from our fathers.^ Or are we justified in 
believing that the sense of the sanctity of law, the pos- 
sibility of pure justice, the quickness of public con- 



EVACUATION OF BOSTON. 23 

science, the sacred humanities of Christ's gospel, the 
deep consecration of a peculiar work for God, are given 
to us as a holy trust ? 

Fain would we believe it. Nay, will it not be faithless 
ingratitude to the God of our fathers if we allow our- 
selves to doubt .'' 

Whatever public shames cause the patriotic boast for 
our country to grow dim in this Centennial hour, we will 
guard against the sin of desponding, — far more against 
that of growing faithless to our trust. In the faith of 
those great truths the fathers of this land did their 
work. And, as it is always, the great conviction filled 
them, and lifted them up to the full height of their prov- 
idential opportunity, inspired by the American idea, 
which is in truth the idea of Christianity itself. Well 
will it be for us if their faith in God and in man, their 
spirit of conscience and fidelity and consecration, may 
quicken us, and our memory of them write itself in 
larger, deeper, more faithful lives. 

" Among the nations bright beyond compare ? 
What were our lives without thee ? 
What all our lives to save thee ? 
We will not dare to doubt thee, 
But ask whatever else, and we will dare ! " 



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